- Take chimp single celled embryo right after fertilization - Chimp gene is 99% similar to human, so change the genes that differ in the embryo and make it look exactly like a human embryo (make it look like Dubya's genome.. he won't be convinced otherwise) - Will we get a Dubya clone from that embryo ??
More improtantly, does this mean that any animal can be turned into a human (or any other animal, for that matter ) ?
The whole problem starts with the Bible trying to pin down the physical nature of the universe along with the 'be kind to thy neighbor' message. If they stuck with the message rather than a whole bunch of baloney (isn't it true that the Bible says that the Earth is 6000 years old), religion and science would have probably never clashed, and mankind would have been way way ahead of what it is know in terms of science and technology. Like it or not we owe a lot to 'militant atheism' for the progress we have made today, for the church would have happily preferred to keep mankind in the dark ages..
Who gives a damn what those morons want? We should't conduct science on the basis of who will or won't like the result. I know we often do, but we shouldn't.
Dark matter is, and always has been, baloney.
Well, I bet you spend a lot of time in the physics lab.. if not.. you've already made up you mind about what you want.. and so you stand accused of what you are accusing dark-matter scientists of.
Well, the Bible was the 'current thinking' centuries years back. They used to think that earth was created 6000 years back.. what tools they used to arrive at that.. no one knows. IMHO, the people who wrote the Bible didn't care whether earth was 6000 or 4 billion years old. All they wanted to do was to appeal to the goodness of human soul.. and they used these 'physical facts' like the age of earth or the number of days the world was created in, etc, only to create a plausible simplistic story which would be accepted by the masses.
And science always has been, and always will be, the 'current thinking of scientists'. Just look at Pluto.. we always thought we had 9 planets because it was the 'current accepted thinking ' of those times, until scietists discovered 2003 UB313.
The Bible was written at a time when the understanding of the physical world was pretty limited.. not suprising then that they talk about so many 'miracles'. If miracles are so common, why don't they happen now ?.. simple.. because we know why lightning happens, we know what aurora are, what the moon is, what shooting stars are.. the public isn't as naive as they were then.
But the Bible demand something which science doesn't.. blind faith. Non wonder it has survived for so long.. because there always will be people with blind faith.
My younger brother, who graduated two years after me, works on TPF over mainframes. He earns thrice as much as me, because there aren't many mainframe TPF developers, but there still are huge systems to be maintained (airline reservation, credit card industry, etc), and so the demand is still there.
In the PBS TV Series "Guns, Germs and Steel", Pulitzer prize winner Jared Diamond claims that wherever early European explorers went, they took with them germs & deseases against which native populations had no immunity (of course, because of evolution.. don't tell me 'God' designed the world that way and unfairly tipped the balance in favor of a certain population!..). An excerpt from his PBS interview:
"ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And the germs--this surprised me very much--you mentioned the germs. They actually developed from the domesticated animals, and that's why Pizarro could bring the germs that killed, what, 95 percent of the people that he met in the new world.
JARED DIAMOND: That's right. And that's one of the surprising discoveries that we've gained from molecular biology in the last decade or two. That's why people couldn't figure out a hundred years ago the ways in which geography tipped the balance of fate among the world's people. We now know that smallpox, measles, and other epidemic diseases of humans like that evolve from epidemic diseases of our domestic animals with which we came into intimate contact when we started to domesticate them 11,000 years ago. Smallpox may have evolved from a disease of our domestic camels. Measles certainly evolved from a disease of our domestic cattle. And so Eurasian people were exposed to these nasty diseases, gradually evolved immune and genetic resistance to them, but Native Americans, without big domestic animals, except the llamas and El Pacas, did not evolve nasty germs of their own, and so had no immunity when Europeans arrived, bringing smallpox and measles and these other nasty germs. So most native Americans died before they could even reach the battlefield. They were killed by Eurasian germs. "
What has happened to the Americans.. the quintessential rationalists ??
I can't believe they're stifling science now. It's so easy to see that ID is wrong. Consider this:
If there was a designer, he certainly can't be compassionate.. why the heck would he design genes that cause only some people to be born with horrendous diseases like muscular dystrophy, or hemophilia. Were they born sinners? Then why would he be so unfair to only them? Why would he design genes that lead innocent people into terrible degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's. I have seen absolutely devout people live and die miserably, simply because they inherited bad genes, and I've seen people who lead a life full of vices live happily and die peacefully, simply because they had the right genes. Certainly doesn't look like the work of an "intelligent" designer, who is fair to all.
Well, but as an Indian, I think I shouldn't worry about it. As matter of fact, I'm all for teaching Biblical biology in American schools. And why stop with that, why not Biblical mathematics. Check this:
A little known verse of the Bible reads
And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it about. (I Kings 7, 23)
The same verse can be found in II Chronicles 4, 2. It occurs in a list of specifications for the great temple of Solomon, built around 950 BC and its interest here is that it gives p = 3. Not a very accurate value of course and not even very accurate in its day, for the Egyptian and Mesopotamian values of 25/8 = 3.125 and 10 = 3.162 have been traced to much earlier dates.
Holy Jesus !!.. imagine those atheistic math teachers teaching pi = 3.1415926535897932384... and corrupting innocent American students. And why stop at that.. why not Biblical Physics..Biblical paleontology (I heard some one built a biblical dino museum.. glory to them) Let those non-Christian infidels from India and China learn things like pure mathematics, modern physics, and the cursed e* word.
After all Jesus is coming (in the summer of 2008 to Pat Robertson's Church ). I'm sure American's don't want to be left back in the line to see him...and don't let him catch your young people reading D..a..r..w..i..n (may his soul burn in hell).
Remember the "Lawrence of Arabia".. the days when the West and the Middle East were such good pals, they would have died for each other. Remember "Israel" ?... Why was there no international terrorism before Israel was created ? As a matter of fact, the Islamist zealots have none other to thank than Israel's policy in Palestine, which has driven thousands of moderate Middle eastern youth to their arms.. If the Nazi crimes were to be punished, Israel should have been created right on the soil of Germany.. instead it was created where the Jew fundamentalists wanted.. and here we are today with thousands of people dead because of international terrorism..
Would you still say that terrorists hate us simply "because of what we are"? or is it because of "what we are doing" ?
Slashdot Mirror
How about this:
- Take chimp single celled embryo right after fertilization
- Chimp gene is 99% similar to human, so change the genes that differ in the embryo and make it look exactly like a human embryo (make it look like Dubya's genome.. he won't be convinced otherwise)
- Will we get a Dubya clone from that embryo ??
More improtantly, does this mean that any animal can be turned into a human (or any other animal, for that matter ) ?
God created earth.. therefore he created earthquakes, tsunamies, hurricanes, floods
The whole problem starts with the Bible trying to pin down the physical nature of the universe along with the 'be kind to thy neighbor' message. If they stuck with the message rather than a whole bunch of baloney (isn't it true that the Bible says that the Earth is 6000 years old), religion and science would have probably never clashed, and mankind would have been way way ahead of what it is know in terms of science and technology. Like it or not we owe a lot to 'militant atheism' for the progress we have made today, for the church would have happily preferred to keep mankind in the dark ages..
I'm a Hindu and I can see your point.. just like you believe I can be 'saved' by submitting to Christ.. so can the creatures of other planets too..
Who gives a damn what those morons want? We should't conduct science on the basis of who will or won't like the result. I know we often do, but we shouldn't. Dark matter is, and always has been, baloney.
Well, I bet you spend a lot of time in the physics lab.. if not.. you've already made up you mind about what you want.. and so you stand accused of what you are accusing dark-matter scientists of.
I wonder how the Intelligent Design guys plan to explain this virus.. why in the bloody heavens did a creator create this virus..
Well, the Bible was the 'current thinking' centuries years back. They used to think that earth was created 6000 years back.. what tools they used to arrive at that.. no one knows. IMHO, the people who wrote the Bible didn't care whether earth was 6000 or 4 billion years old. All they wanted to do was to appeal to the goodness of human soul.. and they used these 'physical facts' like the age of earth or the number of days the world was created in, etc, only to create a plausible simplistic story which would be accepted by the masses.
And science always has been, and always will be, the 'current thinking of scientists'. Just look at Pluto.. we always thought we had 9 planets because it was the 'current accepted thinking ' of those times, until scietists discovered 2003 UB313.
The Bible was written at a time when the understanding of the physical world was pretty limited.. not suprising then that they talk about so many 'miracles'. If miracles are so common, why don't they happen now ?.. simple.. because we know why lightning happens, we know what aurora are, what the moon is, what shooting stars are.. the public isn't as naive as they were then.
But the Bible demand something which science doesn't.. blind faith. Non wonder it has survived for so long.. because there always will be people with blind faith.
If parents were experts on subjects, all Republican parents would teach only intelligent design to their kids..
My younger brother, who graduated two years after me, works on TPF over mainframes. He earns thrice as much as me, because there aren't many mainframe TPF developers, but there still are huge systems to be maintained (airline reservation, credit card industry, etc), and so the demand is still there.
I've a solution for this: Offshore all IT operations to India.. so there'll be no travel.. no risk.
In the PBS TV Series "Guns, Germs and Steel", Pulitzer prize winner Jared Diamond claims that wherever early European explorers went, they took with them germs & deseases against which native populations had no immunity (of course, because of evolution.. don't tell me 'God' designed the world that way and unfairly tipped the balance in favor of a certain population!..). An excerpt from his PBS interview:
"ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And the germs--this surprised me very much--you mentioned the germs. They actually developed from the domesticated animals, and that's why Pizarro could bring the germs that killed, what, 95 percent of the people that he met in the new world.
JARED DIAMOND: That's right. And that's one of the surprising discoveries that we've gained from molecular biology in the last decade or two. That's why people couldn't figure out a hundred years ago the ways in which geography tipped the balance of fate among the world's people. We now know that smallpox, measles, and other epidemic diseases of humans like that evolve from epidemic diseases of our domestic animals with which we came into intimate contact when we started to domesticate them 11,000 years ago. Smallpox may have evolved from a disease of our domestic camels. Measles certainly evolved from a disease of our domestic cattle. And so Eurasian people were exposed to these nasty diseases, gradually evolved immune and genetic resistance to them, but Native Americans, without big domestic animals, except the llamas and El Pacas, did not evolve nasty germs of their own, and so had no immunity when Europeans arrived, bringing smallpox and measles and these other nasty germs. So most native Americans died before they could even reach the battlefield. They were killed by Eurasian germs. "
Payback time ?
What has happened to the Americans.. the quintessential rationalists ??
I can't believe they're stifling science now. It's so easy to see that ID is wrong. Consider this:
If there was a designer, he certainly can't be compassionate.. why the heck would he design genes that cause only some people to be born with horrendous diseases like muscular dystrophy, or hemophilia. Were they born sinners? Then why would he be so unfair to only them? Why would he design genes that lead innocent people into terrible degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's. I have seen absolutely devout people live and die miserably, simply because they inherited bad genes, and I've seen people who lead a life full of vices live happily and die peacefully, simply because they had the right genes. Certainly doesn't look like the work of an "intelligent" designer, who is fair to all.
Well, but as an Indian, I think I shouldn't worry about it. As matter of fact, I'm all for teaching Biblical biology in American schools. And why stop with that, why not Biblical mathematics. Check this:
A little known verse of the Bible reads
And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it about. (I Kings 7, 23)
The same verse can be found in II Chronicles 4, 2. It occurs in a list of specifications for the great temple of Solomon, built around 950 BC and its interest here is that it gives p = 3. Not a very accurate value of course and not even very accurate in its day, for the Egyptian and Mesopotamian values of 25/8 = 3.125 and 10 = 3.162 have been traced to much earlier dates.
Holy Jesus !!.. imagine those atheistic math teachers teaching pi = 3.1415926535897932384... and corrupting innocent American students.
And why stop at that.. why not Biblical Physics..Biblical paleontology (I heard some one built a biblical dino museum.. glory to them)
Let those non-Christian infidels from India and China learn things like pure mathematics, modern physics, and the cursed e* word.
After all Jesus is coming (in the summer of 2008 to Pat Robertson's Church ). I'm sure American's don't want to be left back in the line to see him...and don't let him catch your young people reading D..a..r..w..i..n (may his soul burn in hell).
I hope you get the real message I'm sending..
Remember the "Lawrence of Arabia".. the days when the West and the Middle East were such good pals, they would have died for each other.
Remember "Israel" ?... Why was there no international terrorism before Israel was created ? As a matter of fact, the Islamist zealots have none other to thank than Israel's policy in Palestine, which has driven thousands of moderate Middle eastern youth to their arms..
If the Nazi crimes were to be punished, Israel should have been created right on the soil of Germany.. instead it was created where the Jew fundamentalists wanted.. and here we are today with thousands of people dead because of international terrorism..
Would you still say that terrorists hate us simply "because of what we are"? or is it because of "what we are doing" ?